Contents

Overview of the issue and its national/regional/international context[edit]

This paper attempts to assess the impacts of Haile Selassie’s educational policy on
Ethiopia’s educated elite. It also enquires into the reasons why the policy was adopted in
the first place. The negative role that the Ethiopian educated elite has played during, and
since, the overthrow of Haile Selassie’s regime provides the context of the enquiry.
Admittedly, the continuous political crises and economic stagnation of Ethiopia since the
1974 Revolution point to the leading role played by Ethiopian educated elite. The paper
raises the question of knowing whether the adoption of an education system that
completely relied on Western teaching staff and curriculum – and systematically turned
its back on Ethiopian legacy – does or does not explain the infatuation of Ethiopian
students and intellectuals with Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s and 1970s. The
suggestion is that their propensity to opt for polarizing and confrontational methods of
political competition may be the result of a decentering education system responsible for
cultural cracks into which radical ideas, which were then in vogue, were injected. The
enquiry unravels two major reasons for the adoption of the educational policy: *(i) Haile Selassie and his close associates had basically endorsed the colonial idea according to which non-Western societies were backward, thereby conceiving of modernization as the internalization of Western values and institutions;

(ii) Haile Selassie was all the more willing to push for Westernization as the marginalization of Ethiopia’s traditional values and institutions was the sine qua non for the establishment of his autocratic rule.

Though this study deals with the case of Ethiopia, its regional and international
implications are obvious, given that it illustrates nothing less than the impacts of Western
education on non-Western societies. It adds to those studies that argue that the cultural
drawbacks of colonization and neocolonialism are far more serious than any economic
downsides. The fact that Ethiopians became psychologically decentralized, as in any
colonized country, even though they were not submitted to colonization, confirms the
universally uprooting impact of Western education.

Educational policy in most countries has been designed as the best and unique
method to achieve rapid modernization. As a result, the way modernization was
perceived conditioned the educational policy. Unfortunately, only with few exceptions,
the conception of modernization that has become predominant is the colonial conception,
namely, “modernization versus tradition”. This erroneous understanding led to an
educational policy that advocated full Westernization through the extirpation of the
traditional legacy of lagging societies. The aim of this paper is to show that, so
conceived, modern education does no more than continue and even expand the colonial
paradigm, which also happens to favour dictatorial regimes for the simple reason that the
devaluation of tradition is also how native ruling elites adopt colonial methods and
subsequently rise above their own societies.

The research results establish that the education policy is the answer to the
question why Ethiopia ended up by showing all the symptoms of a colonized country
while not being formally colonized. The alienating effect is concretely referred to the
impacts of an education system based on an alien curriculum and involving foreign
teaching staff. Cultural analysis easily establishes that the infatuation of the educated elite
with radical ideas and polarizing political agendas and methods is a major outcome of an
uprooting education system. On the other hand, the need to eliminate the traditional
constraints that limited the power of the Emperor, such as regionalism and the ideological
authority of the Ethiopian church, explains Haile Selassie’s choice for a policy that
undermined tradition. In a word, this paper concretely establishes the conceptual and
socio-political roots of Haile Selassie’s educational policy.

The study suggests that the way out from the present predicament is the radical
reformulation of the educational policy. However, reformulation does not mean much if
the attempt to Ethiopianize the curriculum is not associated with an effort to reinforce
Ethiopian traditional values and culture. The revival of traditions in the specific sense of
ensuring the emancipation of the study of Ethiopian history and culture from Eurocentric
concepts is, therefore, the most urgent and primary task. In so far as this task is not
carried out Ethiopianization of the curriculum will be without avail. Stated otherwise, the
Ethiopian thinking must cease to posit modernization in terms of getting away from
tradition so as to achieve westernization. Instead, borrowings from the west must be used
to renovate tradition in the fashion of Europeans, who called ‘renaissance’ the
breakthrough that inaugurated their modernization through the assimilation of ancient
Greek rationality.

This work is excerpted from an official document of the United Nations. The policy of this organisation is to keep most of its documents in the public domain in order to disseminate "as widely as possible the ideas (contained) in the United Nations Publications".